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The Truth About Marbury Leaving the Team

While the Knicks were in Phoenix taking on the Suns, Stephon Marbury spent the day in Brooklyn, mourning the death of his mentor, Robert Williams aka Mr. Lou.

Williams coached every great player to come through the Surfside Gardens in Coney Island, including Stephon and his brothers (Don, Eric, Norman, Zach), Sebastian Telfair, Quincy Douby, Chris Taft and Jamel Thomas.

Earl Smith, one of Mr. Williams’s former players who is now a personal assistant to Spike Lee, said Mr. Marbury was in the Williams apartment “crying like a baby.”

"People don't know," Sebastian Telfair said. "But that's why Stephon left, to go to Mr. Lou. I wish I had the flexibility and the leverage to do the same, to be there for him and his family at this time."

“Madison Square Garden, that's the Garden for the professionals," Telfair said. "Our Garden is the Garden for street-ball players." Mr. Lou coached Telfair as well as Telfair's older brother and younger brother in the 36 years he held court there.

When asked how many hours he spent at Coney Island's Garden, Telfair grew puzzled by the small increment of time.

"Hours? Hours ... there's a decade's worth of hours there," he said. "He was there for all of it. He taught us everything, everything. I wouldn't be here, none of us could have done it without him."

Perhaps this is what Steph meant when he said that he had permission to leave.

So the media can put marbury on the back of the newspaper when they believe he abandoned the team but they cant correct themselves when they learn the real reason why he left?

damn u a hater tails, lol, isiah didnt say anything about the story, he clearly stated numerous times that he was going keep that in the organization, he never spoke on it, it was the media who blew it up, the thing i find puzzling if that's what really happened then why marbury or isiah didnt say that in the first place?

damn u a hater tails, lol, isiah didnt say anything about the story, he clearly stated numerous times that he was going keep that in the organization, he never spoke on it, it was the media who blew it up, the thing i find puzzling if that's what really happened then why marbury or isiah didnt say that in the first place?

dr. robotnic.....thats a good point but i found a couple different articles that said this. Isiah allowed marbury to take the fall but at the same time marbury allowed himself to take the fall. Marbury said he had permission to leave the team.....why didnt isiah respond? Maybe marbury was too upset to speak on it and by the time he was over his loss......i dont know. Its interesting but i feel bad for marbury that hes taken heat about it all this time. Maybe Dolan asked marbury and isiah not to speak on it......had they spoken they couldve cleared things up. I was too quick to pull the gun on isiah, who knows why no one (besides telfair) even tried to clear this up.

If this is true then I definitely can understand him leaving. That story was the turning point for me, but I never bought into the selfish shoot first persona stories. I'd like to see what Marbury can do next season.

This still doesnt excuse Marbury of all his other non-sense. he still has time to get his life back into order, but im sick of his antics and so are many many former Marbury fans.

What antics, i dont care to hear about the antics from earlier in his career. This was the only recent thing thats been brought up. F*ck outta here with that nonsense.

Originally Posted by donchris

If this is true then I definitely can understand him leaving. That story was the turning point for me, but I never bought into the selfish shoot first persona stories. I'd like to see what Marbury can do next season.

Hes shoot first but hes still a good passer. Chris Paul is the same way but im not tryin to compare the 2.

What happened with Marbury "leaving the team" never made sense to me. I always knew there must be sumthin more to it. I kept sayin in January of 07 I saw a different marbury. He finally had the right attitude. Thats why him "leaving the team" suprised me and i never believed that we knew the full story. I searched and found a couple different articles that said this, including one from the new york times. Im not sure why the post and daily news never corrected themselves, its messed up. People have been misled this whole time. Im suprised i didnt figure this out til now but i thought his basketball mentor had died before he "left the team." Now we know why he really left the team. Theres still unanswered questions, like why didnt marbury, thomas, the ny post, and daily news say anything about this.

So he left the team for a legit reason? Still doesn't excuse him from being a selfish prick and excepting his demotion from the starting lineup.

And i know i'm going to catch grief for this but do u think if Marbury would have left for this funeral if he didn't get into a fight earlier in the day with Isiah. It sounds bad but your a a professional your job is play basketball, how many times have u heard about players playing the day after there father, or mentor died. Just remember back to last year, Derek Fischer flew in to Utah late afte his daughter was just diagnosed with cancer.

So he left the team for a legit reason? Still doesn't excuse him from being a selfish prick and excepting his demotion from the starting lineup.

And i know i'm going to catch grief for this but do u think if Marbury would have left for this funeral if he didn't get into a fight earlier in the day with Isiah. It sounds bad but your a a professional your job is play basketball, how many times have u heard about players playing the day after there father, or mentor died. Just remember back to last year, Derek Fischer flew in to Utah late afte his daughter was just diagnosed with cancer.

I get the impression that you actually want to see Marbury fail. You hate him like he knifed your pops. Marbury has a valid excuse, lets see you come up with a valid excuse for being a little prick. Your probably the most unrealistic poster on here. You've been rooting against marbury from day one. Derek Fisher came back for a playoff game, you cant compare a playoff game to a game in November. I cant respect you or your posts, for whatever reason you have alot of hatred in you towards marbury.

*edit*

Since we know marbury has a valid excuse for leaving the team how do we know what his reaction was to being benched?

Because of Mr. Lou's death, we dont know how marbury wouldve reacted to being benched. Im sure he wouldnt had been happy and heres why:

(You have probably seen this before but ill post it again)

Marbury was off to a slow start
Crawford was off to a slower start
Marburys defense was below average
Crawfords defense was poor
Marbury gets benched
Crawford is allowed to continue to suck

I can get stats of crawfords shooting percentages from november if you dont believe me, he got off to a terrible start. But somehow he continued to start while Marbury got benched for the turnover prone Mardy collins.

So there you go unrealistic. You cant argue that crawford is a better defender then marbury. Hes one of the worst defenders in the league and a large percentage of this site/knicks fans will agree on that.

So why does marbury get benched and Crawford is allowed to keep his starting job?

Because crawford wears #11 and sucks Isiah until his d1ck is sponge like.

????????????

The article was dated Nov 16 2007, so why has this gone unnoticed for so long? Why didn't the family of Mr Lou go to the papers to clear things up for the sake of Steph? Why would his cousin let him take the fall for so long without coming out and speaking to the press? Why would Isiah not clear things up for the sake of saving the organization the embarrassment? Why wouldnt anyone on the Knicks have gone to the press to stand up for their teamate, someone on the team would've had to know. The rumor is the team voted for Steph not to play the next game, wouldn't explaining to them that Steph left for personal reasons had made them deal with playing a lot better, and saved a lot of ill feelings towards Isiah?

Something is not right here, we all know that everytime a two GMs have a conversation regarding a trade it is somehow uncovered, this seems impossible for someone to have missed.

You know what I realized....Steph's father passes away at a Suns game, the fallout with Isiah was as they were headed to face the Suns.

A gleaming white Cadillac with a license plate reading MISTERLU, its engine off, was parked next to a basketball court in a Coney Island housing project last night.

The coach Robert Williams, also known as Mr. Lou.

The white Cadillac given to Mr. Williams by Stephon Marbury, the Knicks point guard who once played for him.

Rodney Brown and his father, Ray, longtime friends of Mr. Williams, at the court called the Garden. Rodney Brown said, “Mr. Lou was the gardener, and we were all his flowers.”

The Cadillac belonged to Robert Williams, a manager at a Brooklyn nursing home. Of course, that job did not pay for the vehicle, a tricked-out car Mr. Williams had trouble figuring out how to operate. Mr. Williams did other work, on the basketball courts that were last night as quiet as his parked car.

For 36 years, Mr. Williams, known on and around those courts as Mr. Lou, coached and mentored hundreds of talented young basketball players from Coney Island. Stephon Marbury of the New York Knicks, who had given him the Cadillac, was one of them. Sebastian Telfair of the Minnesota Timberwolves was another. Mr. Williams died of a heart attack on Tuesday afternoon in his apartment in the housing project. He was 64.

Mr. Marbury, who left the Knicks without public explanation on Tuesday, spent at least several of his hours away from the team at the housing project, called Surfside Gardens.

Dwayne Tiny Morton, the head basketball coach at Lincoln High School in Coney Island, where Mr. Marbury played ball, said, “I mean, there comes a time when you have to stop what you’re doing, even if it is playing professional basketball, and pay your respects.”

And so the death of a legendary street-ball mentor became for a brief time intertwined with the drama of the Knicks and their star point guard. The guard, Mr. Marbury, has been out of favor with his current coach, Isiah Thomas, but rejoined the team last night in Los Angeles. Mr. Marbury was one of the scores of Mr. Williams’s former players who showed up on the basketball court in Coney Island known in street basketball circles as the Garden.

“This is the Garden, Mr. Lou was the gardener, and we were all his flowers,” said Rodney Brown, who played for Mr. Williams and stood by the court with his father, Ray Brown.

Mr. Williams’s memorial services tomorrow in Coney Island promise to be part all-star reunion, part neighborhood gathering. Four of Mr. Marbury’s brothers played under Mr. Williams’s tutelage. Don was a leading scorer for Texas A & M. Eric teamed with the future N.B.A. star Dominique Wilkins at Georgia in the early 1980s. Norman played at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. And Zack Marbury played at the University of Rhode Island.

But there were other great players: Quincy Douby, who played at Rutgers and is now with the Sacramento Kings: Chris Taft, who played for the University of Pittsburgh and then briefly for the Golden State Warriors; and Jamel Thomas, who played at Providence College and is now with a professional team in Italy. Last month, Mr. Thomas flew Mr. Williams and his wife, Sophia, to Italy to watch him play.

The Garden was all but adjacent to Mr. Williams’s building — in which his apartment, 11-F, was a virtual locker room for his many teams, and their dozens of championship trophies. At the modest basketball court outside, groups of residents and others would cling to the chain link fence on hot summer nights to watch some of the best street ball in the city.

Last night, candles were placed on the court at mid-court, the three-point line, and the foul line.

“He was the backbone of this whole community,” said Rodney Brown. “With talented kids, he taught them how not to be bought. With lesser players, he took them under his wing. And with kids who didn’t have money, he reached into his own pocket to buy them sneakers.”

Ray Brown said he grew up with Mr. Williams, whose nickname derived from a childhood sobriquet Lulu Boy, and who ran an annual tournament held in the memory of a local man shot years back by police officers.

“Some of us went to college, some went to jail and some wound up dead; Mr. Lou stayed here with the kids,” said Ray Brown.

Some of them were allowed up to Mr. Williams apartment to view his lifeless body laid out on his bed. One of them was Mr. Marbury.

Earl Smith, one of Mr. Williams’s former players who is now a personal assistant to Spike Lee, said Mr. Marbury was in the Williams apartment “crying like a baby.”

“We lost a coach, a mentor and a grandfather — Mr. Lou was all of those things,” he said.

Mr. Morton, who has won five city titles as a head coach at Lincoln, was aware of Mr. Marbury’s delicate situation with the Knicks but was not surprised that he would show his loyalty to his neighborhood and its pillars.

“How could you not show up to say one last goodbye?” he asked.

This may have answered one question but we have alot of new questions. Is Marbury really that hated, to the point where espn, the ny post, and other media sources didnt correct themselves?

That timeline doesn't make sense. Why did he get on the plane to Phoenix in the first place if his intention was to go to the funeral?

For your information, the papers did report this, but speculated the real reason he left. It's been widely reported by media and players who witnessed the incident, that Steph and Isiah got into a fight on the plane because he was being benched. He then blackmailed Isiah, left the team, and THEN found out his mentor died. At that point he decided to fly back to New York for the funeral.

If he left just to go to a funeral, then why the all the hooplah and public hand shaking before games? It doesn't add up.

I'll be the first to admit that I am a Marbury hater. But if he did just leave for a funeral, then it's really f*cked up how Isiah made Marbury look like he was AWOL.

I'll be very curious to see how Marbury plays next year. If he embraces team basketball and plays hard for D'antoni and his teammates, then I will be happy for him and will not talk sh*t about him anymore. But if he pulls more bullsh*t and pisses off D'antoni and his teammates then I would hope the Marbury lovers will admit that he is bad for the Knicks and for basketball in general.

Essentially, I'm anxiously awaiting next year. I'm willing to accept Marbury and forget all the crap I've heard about him, but at the same time I'm cautiously skeptical.

MSG I can admit fully that i don't like Marbury at all. I would like to know what Marbury has one for the Knicks that has warranted this much love from you?

Marbury hasnt won anything for the knicks. He wasnt my favorite player when he first got here, not until january of 2007. He stepped his defense up big time and played the best basketball of his career as i and some others believe, such as walt clyde frazier and theres other knicks fans who agree with this.

Here are some impressive games from last year:

Dec. 27, 2006 vs Detroit
Marbury-41pts, 8asts
Billups-17pts(3-13)

Jan 5, 2007 vs Seattle
Marbury-28pts(9-17)
Ray Allen-11pts(3-10)

Marbury continued to play well for the rest of January and February. In March, he once again became Starbury

The numbers went down in the time frame that i always say marbury played his best defense, proving that there might be some validity to what im saying.

He played his heart out last year, im not sure why more people dont see this. I think alot of you forgot about it when he "left the team" and held that against him. He finally showed to me at least that his attitude was no longer a problem and that he can be a team player. His assists might not prove what im saying, i believe he averaged around 6 assists per game during this stretch but he doesnt have the best teammates. Its not easy tryin to set up poor shooters like crawford and q-rich, or slow moving turnover prone centers like eddy curry.